Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention relate to the field of online advertising and, in particular, to a system and method for delivering online advertisements.
Description of the Related Art
Today, there are several ways advertisers can specify how and when their advertisements (ads) should be served on web pages. Most of these involve scheduling an ad or series of ads to be delivered by an ad server over a defined period of time to an anonymous set of Internet users with a set of known characteristics. The known characteristics are typically user-declared information, such as gender, age, profession, etc, that the user has submitted to an advertiser or publisher, or inferred behavioral information based on specific sites visited or series of sites visited that indicate the user's interest in certain areas (sports, finance, entertainment, etc.). Users with the desired characteristics are identified using tracking cookies that have previously been placed on their computers by an ad server. When the ad server receives a request for an ad from a publisher (e.g., a web site), the ad server will return an ad to the publisher if the request is for a user with a tracking cookie with characteristics defined in the scheduled advertising campaign.
Through the ad server, the advertiser can specify ranges of time during which ads are to be served, but the advertiser has no ability to define when the ad should be served outside of a specified window of time. For example, the advertiser can schedule an ad to be served to tracking cookies with certain characteristics for the next 24 hours or the next week, etc. Ads can also be day-parted and/or time-parted, meaning ads are to be served only on certain days of the week or certain times of the day. Once an advertiser has defined the type of users the advertiser wants to target, time is the only determining factor for when the ad will be served.
However, there are several constraints to this approach. If an advertiser has defined a set of user characteristics to target before launching the campaign, but subsequently does not want to serve an ad to one of those users, or wants to serve a different type of an ad to a user who might have otherwise fit the characteristics when the campaign was first defined and set up in the ad server, because the user took an action that has since made the ad irrelevant to the user, such a change is not possible. For example, users may have already bought the product being advertised, rendering the ad less relevant and a waste of the advertiser's money, or the user may have received other communication from the company via other means such as e-mail, regular postal mail, or on social networks that is somehow inconsistent with the communication in the ad. Consequently, the ad should not be served to avoid confusion, or it should contain a different message that is more consistent with the messages from the other channels.
In an attempt to increase ad relevancy, advertisers sometimes use the concept of “storyboarding” with their ads. This involves serving a user multiple ads in a specific sequence that collectively tell a consistent story. For example, an ad with a specific message is first served to the user, and if the ad server records that the ad was served successfully, it will attempt to serve a second (and possibly third and fourth) ad with a different message that builds on the first message. Storyboarding techniques employ factors other than time for serving an ad to a user with specific cookie characteristics, but it is still very limited in its ability to orchestrate delivery of ads to specific users, and because it takes into account only what other messages have been served to that user by that specific ad server, not other ad servers or marketing systems such as e-mail servers or mobile SMS servers.